My goal over the last year and a half has been to write and publish more. I’ve been trying to hit publish even if the writing isn’t perfect.
When you sketch too early, premature decisions get encoded into the sketch that influence the future design process.
It's common for designers to receive feedback on their work that isn't very helpful. But that doesn't mean the feedback isn't valid, or that it can't be trusted.
Today we're designing apps, not newspapers, but the fear of people missing content that appears below the fold persists, and has more influence than it should over the way we design products.
Getting feedback from stakeholders throughout the design process is crucial, but it's not always easy to extract valuable or actionable feedback that you can use to improve the design.
Imposter syndrome doesn't go away on its own so you have to learn how to work with it.
Reflecting on how my early experiences as a designer influenced my feedback style.
We all get stuck from time to time. This essay offers a way out.
Lessons learned from leading our design team’s transition to Figma
On the feelings of anxiety and self-doubt that come with new opportunities
Thoughts about the phase where you know you’re not very good but don’t know how to get better.
We take in a lot of information about the world around us, but we don’t pay much attention to any of it. How can we get better at noticing?
What to do when the pressure of designing for an imagined audience sets in
Mentorship from the wrong angle isn’t mentorship.
How many times have you presented an entire product experience only to have someone in the room zero in on one line of text and pick it apart?
As a product designer you should not seek the perfect solution to a problem, but one that is good enough.
Every once in a while I make decisions as if I’m living according to some kind of life script. I don’t know when the script was written, but I do sense that I’m one of the screenwriters...
In reflecting upon how I’ve approached design and work throughout my career, and as I consider what I want to do and be in the future, I’ve noticed a shift in mindset from where I was 3-4 years ago. What’s the shift?...
In my experience designing a communication platform at Paylocity I’ve observed that the way a person perceives their audience affects how they choose engage (or not engage!).
When I’m struggling with a design problem, I sometimes create a presentation for it. I do this whether I intend to give the presentation or not.
For a recent project I was asked to propose a solution for enabling people to collaborate within a shared document space (a la Google Docs). Right away the team started talking about the various features we could add. But it’s not useful to think in terms of features so soon.
Thoughts informing my latest work in the collaboration space
Thoughts about how to position yourself as a new designer on a product team or at a company
Lessons learned from George Pólya’s How to Solve It
Expanding on Ben Thompson’s ideas about principle stacks from the Exponent podcast